The images in Nostos are part of a larger body of work executed as part of my postdoctorate research at the University of Brighton. The research is concerned with notions of place, identity and belonging while focusing on contemporary issues of rural landscape and environmental, gendered ideas of nature. After relocating from London to Brighton in the aftermath of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU–and moved by my personal feelings of displacement–I set out on daily walks in the Sussex countryside with the intent to photograph and make sense of my own place in this new landscape. The work engages with the English landscape from an outsider's point of view and is aimed at investigating the dynamics that shape our relationship with place and our sense of belonging—the ways in which we connect and give meaning to (and in turn are shaped by) the places we inhabit—and how creative inquiry and photographic practice can, through innovative photographic strategies, prompt new ways of thinking, imagining and representing rural landscape as valuable social, cultural and environmental space while reconsidering our relationship to nature. Today our heavily cultivated land is not nature in an idealised sense: it is not the pristine wilderness of the American myth and it is not the infinite pictorial landscape, the horizon between earth and sky, of our European romantic tradition. Our contemporary rural landscape speaks not only of the long process of domination and objectification through which humans have, over time, shaped, excavated and altered the surface of the earth but also of the different ways in which they have imagined and given meaning to it, leaving visible and invisible marks on the fabric of the land. If today nature is always and inevitably nature after nature—a nature that has moved into the places of man, always mediated by human action, imagination and affection—then rurality can signify a reminder of a total nature where humans and other-than-human collide. The project sits within a field of landscape photographic practice using analogue and darkroom methodologies. It is developed through a series of small, monochromatic images taken with a 4x5 large format camera, hand-printed on traditional silver-halide film, created in response to walking on the ancient paths of the South Downs and organised in a series of unpopulated landscapes that bear the traces of a long history of human presence. Together, these images form a collection of fragments of nature that, locating the rural within a local landscape, combines individual and collective memory, interior and social spaces. The entwining of personal and collective memory is an essential part of my research, mediated through specific darkroom strategies. This approach results in a self-reflexive practice that—connecting meaning to processes—develops a performative idea of the photographic gesture able to conjure the partial and selective mechanisms of personal and collective memory and the invisible, emotional ties that connect people with places.